NASDAQ Continues the Data as a Service Trend

Over the past few months at PW we've noticed steady increase in the number of mentions of Data as a Service (DaaS) and this trend looks to continue. Our first post on the subject was by a guest author Pete Soderling who introduced us to the concept and discussed pricing models. Then we continued the theme by posting about a partnership between a stock data site and an open data platform, working together to deliver a stock historical data API. The latest big move in this area sees NASDAQ creating a Data-On-Demand service accessible through a Web API.

This is a progressive move for NASDAQ who have previously made the data available in a much less accessible and flexible format, as SearchCloudComputing writes:

The NASDAQ Data-On-Demand service will allow users to connect programmatically to NASDAQ's massive data store instead of having to either look at it online or download giant chunks of raw data and sort it themselves.

It's really interesting to see a large finance sector organization trust the cloud. Many banks and other financial institutions seem to be holding off from a move to the cloud. The general concensus about the reason for this is that they have a concern about cloud service security. This move by NASDAQ could potentially pave the way for other similar organizations to start considering the cloud as a viable, and secure, option. However, in this case it might have been cost saving that has been a real motivating factor.

Also from the SearchCloudComputing story:

Since NASDAQ has so much historical data, the costs to store and use the data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) can add up to hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars per month; spare change from an enterprise perspective on operating costs.

How long will it be until we start to see more financial institutions moving services to the cloud? Will the DaaS trend continue as more organizations realize the value of their data and build, or use third party services, to expose that data? And will we see a convergence with a massive trend of the past few years, the real-time web, as companies start to expose real-time data services?